Thoughts (and occasionally fuming) about the state of science, fiction, and science fiction.

by author and technologistEdward M. Lerner

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Look deep into my eyes (er, deep into space)

As a technologist and an SF author, I am -- no surprise -- enthusiastic about space exploration. So although American astronauts remain dependent on ever-pricier Russian transportation to the ISS, and will remain dependent for several more years, it's good to see that "These 5 far-out space projects are making science fiction a reality: From 3D food printing to warp drive." (The three projects not named in the subtitle, just to afford you a sneak peek, are: growing plants on the Moon, private mining of asteroids perhaps beginning as early as 2016, and Tokyo-based Shimizu Corporation wanting to build a giant solar-power plant across the lunar surface.)

Down a wormhole

(Many SF authors have toyed with FTL travel [sometimes aka warp drive], asteroid mining, and food synthesizers, so I claim no ground-breaking credit for my own fictional dabbling in those areas. I will, however, point out that paving the Moon with solar cells was a key plotelement of my 2005 novel Moonstruck.)Among the major challenges of exploring other worlds is landing on them. (As a side note, Mars is a particularly tough destination: it offers enough atmosphere to generate reentry heat, but not enough to slow a spacecraft down very much. For more on these and other landing considerations, see, on howstuffworks.com, "How will landing on Mars work?") You wouldn't want to drop a person in the following way, sans airbags and parachutes, but to deliver robotic probes, this is very clever: see "NASA’s Super Ball Bots Set to Explore Saturn’s Largest Moon?"

Fireball over Chelyabinsk

Remember last year's asteroid air-burst explosion over Chelyabinsk, injuring thousands? One prospectively positive outcome (that I should have mentioned months ago): "U.N. to create asteroid defense group." When -- because it's only a matter of time -- a dangerously sized NEO (near Earth object) is spotted in an Earth-threatening orbit, it may be late in the game to start thinking about who should do what and how. Hopefully not too late ...

Three months after the asteroid-defense vote in the General Assembly, and approaching one year since the Chelyabinsk incident, AFAIK the UN's good intentions have yet to progress in any concrete way toward action. (Inaction at the UN ... go figure.)

The €700 million mission is designed to pin down the three-dimensional
positions and velocities of a billion Milky Way stars, which amounts to
roughly one out of every 100 stars in the galaxy.

Hubble "deep field" survey

Many inferences about the cosmos depend on knowing the positions of very distant objects -- astrometry -- and we have decent estimates for very few. The Gaia mission will improve matters a lot. And while parallax measurements made from Gaia data will apply directly to only (a subset of) stars within our own galaxy, improved estimates of neighborhood distances will serve to improve the calibration of the "standard candles" used to estimate the distance to other/remote galaxies. Whatever we (think we) understand about cosmological origins, the expansion of the universe, and dark energy derives from what we (think we) know about the latter class of distances.

What to read?

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Featured Post: A Milestone

On October 16, 2007, Fleet of Worlds was first published. That is: ten years ago to the day. Larry and Ed at 2015 Nebula weekend This...

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“When the artificial intelligences ... go maverick, they turn out to be the true weapons of mass destruction. A fast, fun read.” — Sci Fi Weekly

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About Me

I'm a physicist and computer scientist (and an MBA, of less relevance to most of these posts). After thirty years in industry, as everything from individual technical contributor to senior vice president, I now write full-time. Mostly I write science fiction and techno-thrillers, now and again throwing in a straight science or technology article.